What the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition's specs and pricing mean for PC gamers

After months of trickles and teases, the full hardware details about the first Radeon Vega graphics card are finally here. Preorders for the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition apparently opened late Thursday ahead of the card’s June 27 launch.

Don’t get too excited though, as this hardware is intended for “data scientists, immersion engineers, and product designers” rather than gamers. That professional focus reflects in the pricing: The air-cooled Frontier Edition costs $1,200 and the liquid-cooled Vega goes for a cool $1,800 at SabrePC. (Exxact also has Radeon’s new card up for preorder.) Still, the Vega Frontier Edition’s specs give us a ballpark glimpse of what we might expect from consumer Radeon RX Vega graphics cards when they launch at the very end of July.

Here are the key Radeon Vega Frontier Edition details, pulled from the listings on those two stores and previously revealed information. The air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations have identical specifications aside from the thermal design power (TDP) rating.

Stream processors: 4,096

Compute units: 64

Single precision floating point performance: 13.1 TFLOPS

Double-precision floating point performance: 26.2 TFLOPS

Pixel fill rate: 90 gigapixels per second

Memory: 16GB HBM2 in two stacks

Memory bandwidth: 483GBps

TDP: 300 watts (air-cooled), 375W (liquid-cooled)

Display outputs: three DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI “4K60”

The final core clock speed for the cards weren’t announced, but knowing what we do about the Frontier Edition’s teraflops performance and hardware details, it will likely peak around 1,600MHz.

At $1,200, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has Nvidia’s similarly prosumer-focused Titan Xp squarely in its sights. Here’s how the two cards stack up in a handful of scenarios, courtesy of Exxact.

What it means for gamers

Puzzling out what these specs portend for consumer graphics cards is tricky, especially because Radeon boss Raja Koduri already said that the Frontier Edition doesn’t represent Vega’s pinnacle of gaming performance.

“Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!” Koduri said during a Reddit AMA in May. That likely means a higher core clock, which could strain the 300W maximum TDP of the air-cooled version—even though it's already 50W higher than what's in Nvidia’s Titan Xp and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

If you did want to compare, though, the Vega Frontier Edition is clocked about 55 percent faster than the Fury X. Adding 55 percent more oomph to the Fury X’s gaming performance sees it land somewhere between the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti, depending on the game and resolution. But again, do not take that estimate as gospel.

Speaking of hardware configurations, Apple’s iMac Pro rocks Radeon Vega graphics, including an option that packs 56 compute units. That’s eight fewer than the Vega Frontier Edition, but the CU count lines up exactly with the air-cooled Radeon Fury from the last generation, providing yet another hint at what we may see when the consumer Radeon RX Vega lineup launches later this summer.

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